LEGO Building Instructions
archive.org
archive.org
¹ https://lego.brickinstructions.com/m/lego_instructions/set/6...
[0]: https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/avlad
Edit: What this means is you can open any* link to lego.brickinstructions.com and see it in the wayback machine (IA ingests these archives)
*maybe not the mobile view you linked, not links after the job ran, not pages that couldn't be found in a crawl
I think the lego itself is still somewhere at my parents place, but the instructions were lost long ago
I played so many hours with this one...
It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.
It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
My guess is that is why techies keep inventing their own Lego sorting machines
What! That is the best part!
Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know, the clatter of a bajillion pieces of precision plastic, each with their different cavities and sonority, moving around each handful you scrape off to the side... Good times.
In the rare occasion I get a Lego set nowadays (no kids yet), the first thing I do is open every bag of pieces into a tray so I can do it on a smaller scale.
I was probably 8 or 9. From that point on, fuck it, they all go in one big box. My brothers and I would compete to see who could find the most valuable pieces. Mostly treasure chest coins, little gems, and basically anything translucent qualified - transparent single stud pieces, cone pieces, and lightsaber beams were very high value, since one could not build a respectable Lego sci-fi arsenal without all of them.
He is very fortunate to be part of a reasonably affluent family, so he had like 6 60-liter boxes full of assorted Lego.
We would spill a couple at a time (who am I kidding we spilled all of them) on the floor, when the flow of pieces stopped, the game was on! So many arguments about the nature of the simple shapes, like "oh no this isn't a blue lightsaber, it is a cylinder of pure diamond!"
When I built Titantic last year (first Lego I'd done in maybe 30 years) it was split out over dozens of small bags, and all the parts you'd need for one section would be in that one bag with no more than, say, 200 pieces in it. Often there's be a smaller bag inside for holding the 1x1 stuff.
So I built the whole thing with two tupperware containers..one decent size square "bowl" and s much smaller one for the tiny stuff.
Killed a month off and on putting that thing together. I was recovering from foot surgery so stuck in bed.
Luckily, the Titanic actually builds as 6 sections, with 3 pairs that join more or less permanently, while there are then a couple of pins and rods that hold the whole thing together (along with a rather clever tensioning gear... the main lines are there as strings, and do hang in a true catenary. )
So each of the 6 sections I basically built on a hardback book.
A few build pics:
Made for a very doable build, even given pretty hefty physical limitations.
Anyway like I said, we definitely always built the kit per the instructions first, it's just that the impulse to keep a TIE fighter a TIE fighter was never stronger than the impulse to build something new.
I don't buy or aspire to own new Lego as an adult, but I'm still basically doing the same thing I did as a kid: every time I decide to do a hardware project is me digging through my bins of assorted parts instead Lego parts.
Oh and of course, my desk is perpetually just as messy as the floor was as a kid, and I'm often fidgeting seeing how random things do/don't fit together.
(also, also... building the set? nah, building my own things without instructions, and similarly writing my own code...)
You will know no fury as when your kids intentionally mix up all the pieces for fun. We have hundreds of LEGO people, and my kids intentionally dismembered them into their individual pieces (including HANDS!). But how can you get angry at kids playing??? twitch
She can play with them supervised, but she'll have her own. This is all assuming she's even interested, she's only 2 so who knows yet.
Also some the ones she's playing with are currently over 30 years old and still going.
Yes, let kids mix and match and play. But also acknowledge that we all play differently, and for some people having a model of something that they built is where the fun lies. People who like organization can still have fun, let's not shame them for their preferences.
My friend, let me introduce you to this Spotify playlist: LEGO White Noise [1]
[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/6qZUya0mkucuxvoIp4akVT?si=RgH...
There are two sounds I associate with Lego. The one you describe and the other.
The words you can find and the tone you utter them with when you unexpectedly stand on a piece, or even better, when you kneel on a bit when trying to find the tv remote.
I would just like to pay once for an app that 100% offline scans for blocks. Let me pick an instruction book and begin pointing out pieces to me that belong in the set.
Fingers crossed.
Also helps him learn to adjust on the fly, which is a great thing to learn at a young age.
More recently, I also got out my old boxes of Knex, which I'd put away a decade ago by sorting the parts by color into about a dozen quart-size ziploc bags (there are far fewer variants of Knex than of Lego, even ignoring the myriad custom tiles and stickers). He was THRILLED to have them all sorted, and for more than a month now - probably a dozen sessions of use - has put them back in the right bags. It's like pulling teeth to get him to keep his art supplies organized, those can just be piled in a heap, it can take two hours for him to do his laundry, typical playtime with friends is an explosion of toys from bins, but it is critical that the Knex go in the right bag even during use.
After seeing that, I got a compartmentalized organizer that used to hold fishing tackle, dumped all the tackle in the big tackle box, and washed it, and he has been keeping "the good Legos" in that. If you're curious, it turns out that the good Lego are the wheels, propellers, blocks with pins to connect to those wheels and propellers, the Technik couplers, the Ninjago transparent flames, especially the Ninjago spring-loaded bolt gun thing, and the Minecraft character heads Not the character bodies, not the Iron Man head, not even the ones that look like him and Mom and Dad, just Minecraft heads - everything else can go in the bin. I think he made a good selection, builds just seem to go together faster when those parts are available. In particular he used to need help on occasion to find the right wheels - everything seems to need wheels - and now he has them.
God I hope he's more organized and tidy than me.
It's a bit of work but I found enjoyment in sorting my old childhood Lego. Don't do colors, do categories (bricks, slopes, plates, etc). Once done, I could complete my old childhood models even faster than the unsorted ones you buy new. It also lowers the threshold to break it down and build something else since it's so easy to find the parts. On the downside, it takes more space than a single bin.
Are you NUTS?
Are you trying to shame my 1980s values with LEGO?
"I KNOW that FN piece is in here!!!! I JUST SAW IT!!!!"
You're robbing your kids of a life lesson. and better image recognition, memory, sorting processing thoughts, etc.
There are so many lessons embedded in working with LEGO that can only be learnt through the frustration of a F-ton of brix in a bin and your looking for that specific 1x2 -- or worse yet, 1x1 smooth piece.
I used to buy things in bulk from LEGO at the mall in San Jose and just have bins of smooth pieces and other were parts...
Lego is by default the foundationaly builing block.
I HATE custom pieces to a lego set.
I guess that's for people who have a specific thing in mind that they wanted to build. I find a lot fun just picking out random pieces and then thinking about where to attach them afterwards.
But for whatever reason, the scans are poor quality and very dark, and it can be hard to make out what piece is which. These ones look much better
This can't be true: I am very sure that there exist Lego Technic models from before 1996, which is the oldest year that can be selected.
The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result.
I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.
I would build it once, then play with that model for a bit, then deconstruct it, put it into my box of loose LEGO and then build whatever I wanted - sometimes it would look similar, but it was never the same way twice.
I fail to understand expensive sets that get built and sit on shelves or in glass enclosures... Might as well break out the Kragle (I think many people failed to see the point of that movie...)
As a father of three, that's exactly how I see my kids using the sets today. The sets get built once, then they get torn down and the bricks get reused.
Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect.
All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.
In the 1990s, it was a "construction toy" first, playset second, display model last. A kid could take any set and rebuild it into something else in an hour or so. Now, they would need more time only to sort the tiny 1x1 pieces before starting to build anything.
The "voxel sculpture" style where you just stack (mostly) rectangular bricks into a shape is perfectly valid, but it's less interesting to me personally.
Modern Lego supports both. Both are valid. They still sell big brick buckets, and no one's stopping you from buying one of those and doing your thing.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-large-creative-brick...
Still though, I just might have to top off the kids collection with one of these boxes. Good find.
I think there is an actually an "addition" here rather than a change. You're an adult conversing with adults (I assume) and therefore the discussions you have and the marketing you see are more about sets targeted to AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego).
The classic Lego childhood lines (Lego City) still exist and still work just as well for play and creative construction as they ever did - and they don't use a lot of 1x1s. It's just that we've also gained these new lines of large adult sets that never used to exist.
In the 1990s, Town vehicles were 4-stud wide and didn't focus on the small detailing. The instructions for the original vehicle were just a single sheet of paper with less than 20 steps. You could build the original vehicle by memory after having built it a couple of times with instructions. The back of the box suggested alternative builds, which, although looking "imperfect" were a solid base for imagination.
The kits don't stop him from just building his own stuff either. The two forms of play seem complimentary.
Once they've got a few sets like that, the rebuilding into unspecified stuff seems to come naturally (at least with the cousins and friends kids I've played with).
The point is that Lego can be played with in a bunch of ways. It's parts that you can do whatever with, and it has instructions for one or more models that you can make. Some people like the sheer possibilities of making things up, and some people find that daunting. Lego supports both, and anything in between.
Following the instructions does teach you techniques that you can use on designing your own builds. It's a way to learn from experts.
Indeed: the exact opposite of a set of instructions & specific, custom produced, build pieces.
How they reuse molds in Lego models is crazy. I have a model with a pagoda, that uses bananas for the points on the eaves. My favorite is the orchid model, where the smaller orchid blossoms are demigorgon heads from the Stranger Things sets.
If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.
Now that’s still available but VERY much tertiary.
https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/studio-21050
There are no 'models' to build, and the "instructions" that come with it are more a discussion of architectural principles, as adapted for Lego as needed.
The whole thing was about those designs just springing from the imagination, and I really don't get what fun building toward a prescribed design would be, especially since it's so low fidelity.
Like I understand the appeal of model building but Lego models aren’t very good models & look like ass compared to (often a lot cheaper) model kits.
Not everyone is into the instructions -- my daughter follows them meticulously and will only build with instructions. My son refuses to follow instructions and will only "master build".
When I was a kid I'd build with the instructions, and eventually I destroyed everything and built a whole city from scratch.
Every kid is different.
Now I have my own kids, and they all want to build sets from instructions. The odd time we'll dive into the pile of orphaned bits and build a house or a boat or something, but mostly they want to recreate what they remember. My wife spends hours finding all the pieces of a set and bagging them up for the kids to build later (so she's gonna love this)
It's tempting to say "kids nowadays" but I think it's just different personality types. In other media, my kids are far more creative and imaginative than I ever was, but with Lego sets they prefer to recreate the perfect image than make a hodge podge thing that never existed.
It is a whole lot different from tinkering with arduino hats/sw, as frustration can creep in if things don't work as expected.
It's like painting by numbers. Or drawing from one of those "how to draw a pirate" instructional guides.
It's a completely different thing.
I know a guy who prefers the instructions. He builds them and then keeps them on display, on shelves and such.
One of these days, I want to learn enough computer vision to write an LEGO instruction booklet to LCAD convertor that could be fed old instructions and generate a 3D model of the set. An archive of the instructions is nice, but a virtual archive of sets would be nicer.
You never know when you need one until you do and it's a nightmare if you lost it!
I keep staring at all the artwork included on some of the early Bionicle instructions and I love that dark mysterious island aesthetic.
http://www.technicopedia.com/8865.html
The evolution history of such cars, beautifully presented on SE, is fascinating:
I have this set laying around, mostly complete. Should really rebuild it someday!
So I was doomed to re-read a paper catalog countless times hoping someday I'll get it.
Back then (60s/70s) the sets were quite general and open ended. Modern day Lego has the thinking done ahead of time, and has too many specialised pieces.
Those “specialized” pieces are incredible fodder for sculpting. Check out newelementary.com to see some examples.
However, there's been a huge paradigm shift in terms of what is "allowed" as far as odd brick placements so the realm of what's possible to build has expanded at least as much as the inventory of brick options.
Or ... Reverse image search.
[1] https://www.lego.com/en-gb/service/help/building_instruction...
If you can't figure it out, you can ask for help on the "bricks" StackExchange site[1].
[0] https://www.bricklink.com [1] https://bricks.stackexchange.com/
[0]: As an example, here the description of a brick I struggled to name. I've since figured it out, but you are welcome to guess: flat 4x1 with bumps only on the ends (yes, "bumps", because I don't know what the technical term is. Again, I'm sure there's a guide or glossary I could find.)
I have a palette of bricks of known color to calibrate against. If you've got a good number of sets, you'll likely start to accumulate things that are only in a few colors. If possible, it's nice to switch those up with a 1x2 brick in that color for consistency and because the 1x2s are stable on the large area maps.
> As an example, here the description of a brick I struggled to name. I've since figured it out, but you are welcome to guess: flat 4x1 with bumps only on the ends (yes, "bumps", because I don't know what the technical term is. Again, I'm sure there's a guide or glossary I could find.)
You kind of work up to it. There are very small and hard to read numbers on a lot of the parts that helps sometimes. Searching for 1x4, ignore printed parts, shows 230 parts on rebrickable (other sites may vary), looking through all those pictures gets me to "Plate Special 1 x 4 with 2 Studs" [1]. I don't think there's a brick like this, or I can't find it, just the plate; but then you didn't know the magic terminology that the flat pieces (1/3rd height) are plates, not bricks. Had I properly interpreted your description, I'd have jumped to the plates, special category, and skipped the search.
[1] https://rebrickable.com/parts/92593/plate-special-1-x-4-with...
Judging by the 623 answered questions with the "part-identification" tag (out of 636)[0], I'd say pretty open. A lot of them are just what you are asking for, people helping IDing a single part from a picture. Some are much more specific, asking about minor variations on parts, and still get a detailed answer a lot of the time.
[0]https://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/part-ident...
Note: I'm talking about the layout and graphics of the booklets themselves, not the logical instructions (i.e. recipe book versus recipes).
Why don’t you do it? Or at least start the project? There’s already work in this space as well. I’ll be happy to contribute as well.